Oh, Nikki, you're so fine, you're so fine, you blow my mind...

In the horse race coverage of GOP primary, the big story over the past few days has been the stunning rise of Nikki Haley, suggesting that Trump is not only vulnerable, but vulnerable to a traditional Republican.

 

 

This certainly is exciting news. Let's check in with 538 to see how much she has narrowed the gap.

Hmmm... That doesn't seem t be much to write home about. Perhaps we need to drill down further. After all, in her Nov. 8th NYT piece ("Nikki Haley Is Gaining Ground"), Katherine Miller tells us "[Haley] is gaining in the places that matter." As an example, Miller links to this story about polls in New Hampshire.

 Funny thing about that USA Today article, it was over a month old when Miller posted her piece. That doesn't really support the narrative that recent gains show growing momentum behind Haley.

Let's take a closer look.

A new poll from Suffolk University, The Boston Globe, and USA TODAY found that likely New Hampshire Republican primary voters overwhelmingly favor former president Donald Trump as their party’s nominee for the 2024 presidential election.

Respondents also weighed in on issues like climate change, immigration, and Trump’s legal woes. The poll of 500 likely New Hampshire Republican presidential primary voters was conducted between Sept. 28 and Oct. 2., with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.

 

Given that even a month ago, Haley had already spent enough time in New Hampshire that she might legally be allowed to vote there, a distant second is not all that impressive. Trump, by comparison, had been focusing most of his campaign on a golf course in Florida, but that appears to be changing. 

Trump’s rally on Saturday is one of several trips he’s making to New Hampshire this month as part of a strategic effort by his campaign to ensure he doesn’t lose momentum heading into the early months of 2024 as his rivals campaign relentlessly in the first-in-the-nation primary state, his advisers told CNN. 

Nonetheless, Miller argues, "A win in Iowa or New Hampshire for Ms. Haley would reset the entire primary contest" and it was a recent Iowa poll that set off this latest round of Nikki-mania. The next day the NYT ran another pro-Haley piece, this time without the cover of the opinion section, focused more on Iowa.

 A close second-place finish — or even capturing the biggest vote share in Iowa after Mr. Trump — could catapult Ms. Haley into New Hampshire and the contests that follow, attracting fresh support and prompting some rivals to bow out, her aides and surrogates argued.

 "[C]apturing the biggest vote share in Iowa after Mr. Trump" would include a distant second, which is unlikely to do a great deal  of catapulting, regardless of what aides and surrogates tell gullible reporters from back East, but putting that aside. Let's take a closer look at that Iowa poll. 

From the Des Moines Register:

Also from the Register:

The one place Iowa does have a potentially important and useful role is with politicians who don't yet have a big national presence. The state functions, in a sense, as a search committee, looking over candidates who may not have been on our radar. If Asa Hutchinson were to significantly outperform his polling numbers and come in third or even fourth, that could indicate that he has real potential, but Nikki Haley has been a prominent figure on the national stage for years and is currently experiencing a wave of coverage.

As we've talked about before, there is a certain ebb and flow you expect to see in a primary, particularly among alternatives to a controversial front runner. Voters unhappy with their party's likely choice will look around for a broadly acceptable candidate to converge on. This can produce some rapid and in some cases surprisingly large surges which tend to go away as quickly as they came. If you go back and look at the 2012 and 2016 Republican primaries, you will see this happening repeatedly and far more dramatically than what we're seeing here.

There are certainly scenarios where Haley could get the nomination (almost all involving Trump's health or legal issues), but with this story as with so many we've seen over the past eight years, the main driver of political journalism seems to be wishful thinking.

Three years ago at the blog -- The Myth of the Wright Brothers

Having covered yesterday the lies we tell ourselves about the Apollo program, let's take a look at another favorite.

Tuesday, November 17, 2020

Wrong about the Wright brothers

Following up on yesterday's post, the standard narrative about the Wright brothers was they were two nobodies laboring in obscurity. When the breakthrough came, no one could believe it. 

To support this account you'll often see this quote from Scientific American:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This would seem to be another of those "man will never fly" anecdotes, but context matters.  For starters, the Wright brothers weren't unknowns; they weren't even particularly long shots. They were known to anyone who had been seriously following advances in heavier than air flight. Samuel Langley had reached out to them. Scientific American had given them positive write-ups in 1902 and this in 1903:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Even with the disputed flights, the magazine initially took a more guarded tone:

 The Wright Brothers,  in this  country, who in 1903 made the first successful flight  with an aeroplane, self-propelled and carrying its operator, have recently made a  flight, the particulars of  which have not been given to  the public. 

So if the Wright brothers were recognized as leading pioneers in the field, why was the press so skeptical, even hostile? One reason was that, due to fear of their ideas being stolen, the brothers had become extremely secretive, but the bigger factor was the astounding magnitude of the breakthrough. The brothers claimed to have made one of the all time great advances in transportation technology, but they offered no proof and no explanation for why no one had noticed the airplanes making multiple half-hour flights over the skies of Ohio.

The skepticism was justified. It was also short lived. As soon as confirmation came in, the brothers were hailed as having "already solved the  problem of  the century." Here was the lede of the Scientific American article that appeared less than four months after the "fabled performance" piece:

We love stories about how innocent and clueless our forefathers were about technology, particularly compared with how sophisticated we are today. At least with respect to the turn of the century, I think we may have gotten it exactly backwards.

 

The myth of Apollo

While it has become newly relevant, we've been on this beat for years now.

The seductive notion that it is only our failure to dream big which is holding us back from the glorious future we've long been promised is dangerous- - it leaves us vulnerable to fools and con men - - and it is at odds with the historical record and the way technology advances.

The stories that techno-optimists tell us and themselves are mostly half true at best. They didn't laugh at the Wright brothers. If you go back and read the press coverage in places like Scientific American before the breakthrough at Kitty Hawk, you'll see that, though they weren't the front runners, people were taking them quite seriously, and the skepticism that came immediately after their first flight was pretty much entirely due to their own decision to be highly secretive with their first flights.

Nikolai Tesla did not die in poverty and obscurity because his ideas were too innovative and people couldn't recognize his genius. Tesla was a huge celebrity and more than a bit of a Fame whore with celebrities like Mark Twain touring his laboratory. Tesla died broke because he blew all of his and his investors money on a plan for wireless transmission of power over considerable distance which was a terrible idea at the time and remains unworkable to this day.

Then we get to the all-time favorite dare to dream story, the moonshot. The standard story goes something like this...

The idea of a manned lunar mission seemed out of reach, at least for decades, but then the Bold and charismatic young John F Kennedy made a commitment and gave a speech that inspired the nation to embrace what was possible. It was thanks to that moment of inspiration that man walked on the moon just a few years later.

Pretty much everything in that story is largely false.

Though Kennedy's timeline was aggressive, it was not seen as impossible.

I think we have reversed the symbolic meaning of a Manhattan project and a moonshot. The former has come to mean a large, focused and dedicated commitment to rapidly addressing a challenging but solvable problem. The second has come to mean trying to do something so fantastic it seems impossible. The reality was largely the opposite. Building an atomic bomb was an incredible goal that required significant advances in our understanding of the underlying scientific principles. Getting to the moon was mainly a question of committing ourselves to spending a nontrivial chunk of our GDP on an undertaking that was hugely ambitious in terms of scale but which relied on technology that was already well-established by the beginning of the Sixties.

From The conquest of space by Willy Ley 1949 [emphasis added]

Then, of course, there is the possibility of using atomic energy. If some 15 years ago, a skeptical audience had been polled as to which of the two "impossibilities" – – moon ship and large scale controlled-release of atomic energy – – they considered less fantastic, the poll would probably have been 100% in favor of the moon ship. As history turned out, atomic energy came first, and it is now permissible to speculate whether the one may not be the key to the other.

Nor is there any evidence that the speech, while undoubtedly brilliantly written, actually moved the needle.

Paul Burka, the executive editor of Texas Monthly magazine, a Rice alumnus who was present in the crowd that day, recalled 50 years later that the speech "speaks to the way Americans viewed the future in those days. It is a great speech, one that encapsulates all of recorded history and seeks to set it in the history of our own time. Unlike today's politicians, Kennedy spoke to our best impulses as a nation, not our worst. " Ron Sass and Robert Curl were among the many members of the Rice University faculty present. Curl was amazed by the cost of the space exploration program. They recalled that the ambitious goal did not seem so remarkable at the time, and that Kennedy's speech was not regarded as so different from one delivered by President Dwight D. Eisenhower at Rice's Autry Court in 1960; but that speech has long since been forgotten, while Kennedy's is still remembered.

 As best I can tell from a google search, the speech didn't seem to attract that much coverage, and almost all of that was focused on the proposed spending increase.

 

Even in the write-up in the student paper of the university that hosted the event, the part about going to the moon "in this decade" went unnoticed.

 

 

 I hate to spoil a thousand perfectly good TED Talks, but the actual immediate impact of this admittedly great speech appears to have been virtually nonexistent. People paid it little attention at the time and even less to its inspirational passages, with the Apollo program remaining largely unpopular through most of its duration. 

The actual story of the Apollo Program starts with the cold war mixed with American politics and the good fortune to have D.C.'s most vocal advocate for manned space exploration suddenly become president in 1963 just as the political costs were starting to add up.

 

 

Your chance to see Martin Shkreli unironically say "Pay it forward."

 

 

 

 Last Wednesday and Thursday, we started a thread on Marc Andreessen's “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” (along with a bit of prehistory Tuesday). The manifesto concludes with a truly odd list of "patron saints" of techno-optimism, and if you want to understand the culture behind the movement, that may be the best place to start.

 Many of the names are famous philosophers or scientists like Nietzsche  and Ada Lovelace who have said or done something vaguely relevant to the topic, though in many cases such as Bertrand Russell and Andy Warhol, you get the feeling that Andreessen may not have been all that familiar with most of their work.

There is at least one fictional figure, John Galt, in case you thought I was kidding about the whole Randian thing. Though somewhat curiously, Ayn Rand herself does not make the list.

But particularly for those who want to catch the numerous dog whistles, the most informative entries are the ones you've never heard of.

Max Reed, who we mentioned in our previous post provides some useful background.

The inspiration and audience of this manifesto is the adherents and proponents of “effective accelerationism,” or “e/acc,” a Twitter community nominally centered around the promotion of unregulated, uncaring, and extremely rapid technological advancement but whose real attraction is smug own-the-libs shitposting.

...

On an practical level everything you need to know about “e/acc” is that its foremost proponent is an anonymous A.I.-company founder with a Twitter handle “@BasedBeffJezos” (one of the “Patron Saints of Techno-Optimism,” according to Andreessen’s manifesto); that is, it’s less an ideology or philosophy than an affective organizer for bored men over 35 with MBAs who admire Jeff Bezos and still laugh at circa-2015 Twitter jokes.

 

As Read pointed out, a visit to Beff Jezos' Twitter page is an excellent introduction to the techno-optimist movement and the kind of people you meet there.

The myth of the Greeks and especially the Spartans looms large in this corner of Twitter, with 'myth' being the key word. The touchstone here is the movie "the 300." which shows up constantly both in the form of memes and as a source of information, and more to the point, misinformation about the period.  

It's not difficult to understand the attraction the Spartan myth holds for these people (and why they react so strongly when an actual historian like Bret Devereaux corrects the record). One of the explicit  tenets of the movement is the idea that, unlike previous ages, the modern world does not allow greatness, along with the implicit but still obvious belief that, had they been born in those earlier times, Beff, Marc, and Elon would have been kings and warriors, not the far more plentiful peasants and slaves. 

It's not just Spartans. The overwhelminlyg male e/acc crowd likes to see themselves as knights...

... and action heroes.

 

 I mean, seriously, these are grown men.

 

 

 They take themselves very seriously...

 

...even when talking about things that shouldn't be taken seriously.

The techno-capitalist worldview is one where tech bro founders and venture capitalists have no known limitations.

 

There is only one force that can hold them back.

Regulators.

This last tweet is a triple threat, not only childishly insulting regulators, but also featuring fan favorites Joe Rogan and a Cybertruck.

More on the challenges of settlers

This is Joseph.

So as the current events in Israel/Gaza continue to be tragic, I do think that it is worth noting that the question of who "owns" land is rapidly and quickly very difficult. I have a great deal of sympathy for the notion that oppression is bad and that ongoing oppression is a serious problem, especially when it is coupled with human rights crimes. I also note the current international order is predicated on the idea that nation states should not expand with force (they do anyway, but we try to limit this as a good option). 

So lets look at an example of peace: Ireland. As recently as 1998 there had been a 30 year insurgency in Northern Ireland that killed around 3,500 people (in a region with 1.5 million inhabitants at the time), This was small potatoes compared to past events like this and this. And before you say much about the potato famine, something like 20% of the population of the island either dies or leaves while it is under British governance. It's not the only human rights atrocity of the age (look at central Europe during the 30 years war) or the colonization of North America). 

But somehow there are no calls for expelling people from Northern Ireland. There is a debate about the reunification of Ireland but no real evidence that this is a violent question but more of a political one because of the complications caused by Brexit. Yes, we have evolved to the point where armed uprising is over and there is no strong ideal of using bombs and bullets. 

The other question that is very pragmatic is how long land claims should exist for. It's not an easy question and it resists analysis. This is very important to political philosophy like Libertarianism, because if the starting wealth is not allocated justly then those who were unjustly deprived of wealth have complicated claims that are hard to address. John Locke is smarter, with the labor value of property. But that gives insight into historical contributions that are hard to address, especially as groups shift and merge over time. 

Some examples of complicated questions include:

• Greek claims to Istanbul/Constantinople (1454 was a long time ago and the Byzantines who owned it at least partially assimilated)
• Lenape claims to New York and surrounding areas (clear that they were hard done by, hard to see how to rectify this without a serious amount of harm to the current residents)
• Should the Anglo-Saxons go back to Northern Europe? And how would you tell who they were and where they should be relocated to? 
• Who inherits the Roman claim on North Africa? Or, if it is extinct, how and why?
• Does Russia own Siberia? Or, by extension, America own Alaska?
• What about Soviet era claims on Ukraine (or East Germany for that matter)

I could keep going all day. Migration, including violent migration, occurs as early as we have history. Bret Devereaux has a nice piece on Greek colonization that makes it clear that, at least in some cases, the locals were not happy to have a new city appear and steal the best local land:

At the same time, its clear that some colonies began with the subordination or more often violent expulsion of the local population in the region of settlement, while in others the steady inflow of migrants to a new colony created demands for land that in turn ended with violent expansion.

It is totally unclear how these claims might go back. Because if it is just a continuous identifiable group with a claim that at least some people hold up, then Istanbul is a live issue as is and there can be no end to these potential claims (try proving it wasn't held continuously by someone in the group). 

Now add in the problem of immigration. And not just modern states like America or Canada, but even ancient Rome had immigration. Are immigrants settlers? Uh, yes. Which rather complicates everything. After all, if the government of the day allowed settlers in legally, can that be reversed later? If so, how? 

So I think the example of the British Isles is the way to go. A society that respects the rights of the inhabitants and provides a just governance to all. Many ways that this can be done but liberal democracies seem to be a pretty reasonable and effective solution. But I think that "blood and soil" theories are a rabbit hole and end up in a very dark place. Instead, I would like to make the focus on ongoing oppression. The homelessness crisis among first nation in Canada is a disgrace and, unlike land claims, there is no barriers save government incompetence and racism to ending it today. 

Let's focus on making people's lives better and in finding constructive paths forward.